Wrestling with Religion

Cultural relativism of language is a historically new idea. Rabbinic Judaism taught that Hebrew was the language of Adam, God, the Angels, and all humanity before the Tower of Babel—a view accepted by Christian scholars through the Renaissance, though Adam’s naming the animals suggests that the divine tongue was incomplete. In the Book of Genesis, words are God’s tools of creation, and his coeternal Word (allegorically, at least, a unit of speech) is a person of the Christian Trinity. Language is in God's innermost nature. Ptah, the Egyptian craftsman god, also created the world using language. He spoke words and the world came into being. Sacred words—sound patterns perceived as instruments of power rather than just as tokens for ideas—are deeply imbedded in religion. YHWH really is God’s name in orthodox Judaism, not a noun like the other words he is called by. Vedic tradition considers Sanskrit the language of the gods, and an Arabic Quran is believed to co-exist with God i...

The Burning Bush by Marc Chagall Of course, God isn’t God’s name. It’s a proper noun, but no more the divine name than Elizabeth II’s name is Queen . Speak it aloud or start a sentence with it, and you have a tossup or an interpretation from context. The English word derives from an old Germanic one that referred to Thor, Frey, and Odin and appears in texts of living religions as a translation of deus in Latin, theos in Greek, el in Hebrew, and deva in Sanskrit. All have been used by polytheists and adapted to mean a supreme god such as Zeus. Even Allah , revered from pre-Islamic times as the high god (if not the only god back then), is a Semitic term meaning “the god.” In the Vedantic tradition (which predates the Hebrew Bible by 500 years), ultimate reality (often called Brahman) is a single being expressed by many names and images, human and nonhuman, but transcending all possible names or representations. In contrast, the god of Moses has a true name, one dictated from ...

Blase Pascal (1623-1662), was a mathematician, physicist, and inventor who, after his conversion to Catholicism, paradoxically professed rational agnosticism and (to him at least) reasonable faith. In his Pensees , he demonstrates with math-like arguments the futility of trying to understand the cosmos: “an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere” (199). We hang short-sighted between two abysses, the unfathomably large and the unfathomably small. What can we do then, he asks, “but perceive some semblance of the middle of things, eternally hopeless of knowing either their principles or their end?” (199) It's impossible, Pascal says, to know “a hidden God” (427) immune to philosophical proofs such as argument from natural order. If God exists, He is infinite. Just as the last number of an infinite series cannot be known to be odd or even, so God cannot be known by finite beings. He “is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limi...